CoPress

Today, we learned that a student from Western Kentucky was in Haiti and her family back in the states hadn't heard from her.

We posted something with a link to the iReport profile that her friends had created on CNN. We then posted a link to what we'd posted through our social network pages.

We continued to update the story as we talked to friends and family members as they continued their search and as we learned more about the girl.

Luckily earlier this evening, the girl was found and her family has been in very little communication.

But it had me all thinking, is there anything out there where you can micro-blog a story of sorts. Not with a character limit but similar to what the Toronto Star has done with their timeline view on their front page, but a format where you could type an update with no character limit and then post. From there the next post would be posted on top in a similar box and so on and so fourth.

I think it would allow the viewer better visualization of how the story was developing and breaking and it would be much more viewer friendly than just adding text on top of text in a standard format.

Just an idea. 

The Live Blogging plugin looks cool, I'll have to try it out. 

Alternatively, you can embed a FriendFeed thread (I have an example here: http://rwv.blogspot.com/2009/1…..using.html ) with a comment, link or picture at the top and post updates. There is a character limit, but it is very large and you can just continue in a second paragraph. Plus, others can contribute comments or links to the discussion as it goes along. It's a pretty easy way to do real-time commentary without having to do anything fancy.